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Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) was an American film actress and dancer who attained fame during the 1940s as one of the era’s top stars. She appeared in 61 films over 37 years and is listed as one of the American Film Institute’s Greatest Stars of All Time. Read more on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Hayworth.

GILDA

“Gilda” (1946) contains the most famous role and peak performance of WWII’s GI “love goddess,” the beautiful, alluring, and provocative, red-haired pin-up Rita Hayworth – with her sleek and sophisticated eroticism, lush hair and peaches and cream complexion. Director Charles Vidor lavished admiration on her in this film, helping her to reach her apotheosis as the reigning Hollywood 40s love goddess with this immortal role. Film posters cried: “There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!”

Hayworth’s most famous scene is the seductive striptease (to the tune of Put the Blame on Mame) when she only removes long black satin gloves from her arms. Rita Hayworth’s life was forever affected by her role, as she once reportedly said: “Every man I knew had fallen in love with Gilda and wakened with me.”

The film-noirish screenplay by Marion Parsonnet (and adapted by Jo Eisinger), was taken from an original story by E. A. Ellington. The complex, eccentric, cynical tale was in keeping with the prevailing attitudes of the American post-war era, playing upon US political paranoia of German-Nazi war criminals who escaped and assumed new identities in South America. [Another similar plotline is found in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). The film’s themes include implied impotence, misogyny and homosexuality, although only suggested with liberal euphemisms and innuendo to bypass the Production Code. The semi-trashy crime drama is also known for the erotic strains of the strange, tawdry, aberrant romantic triangle (menage a trois) between the three main characters. Read more: http://www.filmsite.org/gild.html.

In the movie “Gilda”, Rita wears a black strapless dress made in satin by Jean Louis, Columbia Pictures costume designer, who collaborated with the actress in nine films from the 1945 until 1959. Louis is considered “an essential ingredient in the formula that created the image of Rita Hayworth.”